


Who Sings in the Dead of Night

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gratuitous Mythology, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Surrealism, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2015-01-31
Packaged: 2018-03-03 18:58:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 22,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2867786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Coda. Beth is in her grave, the group is moving on, but of course the story doesn't end there. A storm is coming. And for Daryl, who can't and won't let go, the story is moving both backward... and downward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ain't no compass, ain't no map

**Author's Note:**

> Those who have seen my other stuff will have noticed that I tend to work very closely to and with music. So this piece is working from and with [_Hadestown,_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadestown) a folk opera by Anais Mitchell, which is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
> 
> Fair warning, though for anyone who's read any of my aforementioned Other Stuff it should come as no surprise: This is going to get a little strange. It's similar in some ways to what I was attempting with ["To the Arms That Are Waiting Only For You"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2775737) in terms of playing with worlds, reality, and dreams, but it's also lunging in a somewhat different direction. I don't know how long this thing is going to be, but I do know where it's going.
> 
> _Death is the dream._

_hold on tight_  
 _it won’t be long_  
 _'cause the darkest hour_  
 _of the darkest night_  
 _comes right before the dawn_

\- Anais Mitchell

 

He never cared about his dirty fingernails.

Never gave a shit. Why should he have? Dirt is everywhere. Dirt and decay and sweat, blood, shit - the world is full of it, twice as full as it used to be. No one gets through it clean. Not anymore. And probably not before, either - he would have believed that, once. He did. He saw the world on those terms, where goodness wasn't a lie but was utterly out of reach. It might have been part of the world, but it wasn't part of the world in which he made a home. 

Then that world opened its mouth and swallowed everything.

_I'm just used to this. Things bein' ugly. Growin' up in a place like this._

But her. Her.

So suddenly he does care. And he sits for a long time and looks down at his hands, at the dirt packed under his nails, packed in on top of her blood. The blood still stains his fingers, his palms, his forearms from when he knelt beside her and cradled her and lifted her, carried her out. He can't wash it off. He can't lose it.

The others have left him alone. They haven't pushed him. They've barely spoken to him. For a few of them - for Carol, for Rick and Carl and Michonne, maybe for Sasha - it might merely be kindness. For the rest of them, it's because they either don't want to get involved or are too lost in their own nightmare worlds. The ones the pain carves away. Locks you inside.

"Daryl."

And he just got done reflecting on how they've left him alone. Rick's hand on his shoulder, barely there. The wind hisses through the grass, whispers in the trees. He lifts his head, can't look at what he's sitting beside. Clouds are gathering on the horizon. The storm that chased them out of Atlanta has followed them here.

"Daryl, we gotta go."

_Beth, we gotta go._

He squeezes his eyes closed and his dirty nails dig so sharply into his palm that they break the skin. His blood, on top of hers, mixed with the dirt they laid her in.

He gets up without a word. He doesn't look at Rick as he moves back to the rest of them, at Carol - who he knows is watching him - and when he sees Maggie's face, blotched and swollen with weeping, he feels an awful black hatred that he has no idea what to do with. He doesn't want it. It dishonors her.

But she's gone. _So honor ain't worth shit, is it?_

They drive. Ten minutes out, it starts to rain, fat drops that explode against everything they touch. It's dark like evening. Like nightfall. He stares out the window until the world disappears into a gray void.

_We gotta go, Beth._

_We gotta go._

~

Merle waits for him in the boat, a yellowed propane lamp beside him. He leans back, one hand on the tiller, and grins that mean Merle grin - though there's a sadness about it that Daryl thinks he might have been the only one to ever see. There were things he knew about Merle that no one else ever did. Not even Merle, maybe.

But the reasons for Merle in the context of the boat are elusive.

The shore is wide - endless. It stretches forever in either direction. The world above it doesn't seem to be open sky, or a human-made structure. It's something like a cave, only it's not. It's darkness, complete but for the boat, and Merle, and the visible sand - grains polished and black like the eyes of crows.

The boat floats a few feet out. It's the boat in which their father took them both fishing one profoundly strange weekend, in which he proceeded to get drunk - less strange, frankly - and lost his fishing rod on a snag and screamed at both of them, threatened to beat Daryl with his own rod unless he went over the side to retrieve it.

Merle jumped in instead and came back with the rod. Their father hit Daryl anyway. He hit him several times.

The boat was shitty. It was already leaking when they took it out. Three quarters of the way back it basically sank. Yet here it is. And here's Merle.

_You shouldn't be here, baby brother._ Merle's eyes are pale and dead. They aren't walker eyes. They're the eyes of something far deader than a walker. Because Merle is as dead as dead can be. _Not yet, anyway. Whatcha done, got you down here this soon? Been a stupid little shit, got yourself into somethin' without ol' Merle to drag you out of it?_

Daryl just stares at him. He's aware of his own feet on the sand, of the water just inches from the toes of his boots, of the cool, dank air of wherever they are. It smells like dust, like dead mold, like a cellar that hasn't been opened in years. The water in which the boat sits is motionless. With the lantern light playing over its surface, it looks like ink.

But are there are faces in that water? Further out in the shadows, are there hands lifting? Beckoning him?

_This is a dream._ He's sure of it, abruptly, because Merle is dead so Merle can't talk to him, and Merle certainly can't pilot a boat that sank to the bottom of a glorified backwoods mud puddle decades ago. _This is just a fuckin' dream, bro. I ain't nowhere._

Merle laughs, shakes his head. His eyes roll like marbles, the faint dusky hints of pupils drifting into and out of view. _Man, you just as much of a dumbass as ever. Listen here, baby brother._

He leans over the edge of the boat and extends a hand. His fingers drag across the surface of the water, and Daryl sees that it _is_ ink, ink or something like it, because Merle's fingers come away stained. From below the surface, where they touched and set out bands of ripples, something the color of freshly stripped bone rises and rolls like Merle's eyes. Something twisted, mutilated, features that aren't where they should be. Beaten out of place. A knife-wound of a mouth. Broken-toothed grin. It raises its own hand. It knows him. Black water pours out between its split lips, but somehow its voice is still clear. Mocking and mock-regretful.

_I bet there's a bitch, got you all messed up. Am I right? Got you walkin' around here like a dead man, just lost yourself a piece of tail. Must've been a good 'un._

_Tell me somethin'. Was it one of the little 'uns?_

_'Cause they don't last too long out here._

Everything. Everything, the road, the dirt and the blood under his nails and painting his skin, what it is, what it all is, what he is now and what they just put in the ground and what he's leaving behind and what they've lost, he's lost, and he'll never get back, and the whole world is dead now, all of them walking dead, it all rushes in on him like a wave of black water, and Daryl crumples to his knees and starts to scream.

Merle is watching him, hand still on the tiller, laughing.

Laughing with tears running down the channels of his weathered face.

~

But it's not like waking up. It's remembering.

He doesn't want it. He doesn't know why he's been tossed into this. In its own way it's a nightmare, something that operates according to its own logic and from which he can't escape. The hallway had been a nightmare, a thing of that same horrible logic, but this is horrible not because it's horrible but because it so completely isn't.

How long did he stand in that fucking doorway and listen to her play? How long did he stand there with the bow over his shoulder, losing total awareness of his own body, all his attention fixed on the slope of her shoulders and back, how she moved with her playing, how the candlelight caught her hair. How long did he do that? Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen?

Does it matter?

One minute was one minute too long. By then it had been too late. In the coffin, later, it all became just coherent enough to be a vague sense of _what the fuck am I going to do,_ but before that it had simply been a puzzle eating at him, gnawing at everything in him, looking at her and wanting to _do_ something. Wanting to do something so _badly._

Listening to her play, to her sing had been like being scraped hollow and being filled, both at once. Like she was emptying him out. Putting something else there.

He doesn't want to think about this. He doesn't want to. Not her back, not the way he had - for perhaps a split second - considered going silently to her and stroking his hands over her, feeling the weaving of her braid - which she always did, even on the worst days, and he never understood why. He considered feeling the way her hair fell around her neck, the delicate curve of that neck, using his fingers to trace the line of her jaw. Just... touching her. No excuses. No groped-for reasons. Touching her because he wanted to, and because he could.

He can't think about this, because the last time he touched her like that, the first time he touched her like that, she painted him in blood.

~

He opens his eyes. The rain is coming down in sheets, the drops like hammers. Everything is slowing. They're stopping. Voices, people arguing, but all he sees and hears is the rain and the light that shifts through it.

A glimpse of something brighter in the distance. Almost a flash. Maybe lightning. But it looked gold. Like a flare of sun.

He blinks and it's gone.


	2. flowers, I remember fields

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Into the storm, into shelter, into the dark.

What happened is still not entirely clear to him. It becomes clearer, when he runs with them across a cotton field that has more in common with a lake of clinging leaves and fluff and mud, when some instinct pulls his attention back and he looks behind them, and he sees the _actual_ lake where he's pretty sure the road was only a few minutes before.

_Wash-out,_ he thinks - dully. Something burst its banks. Lightning breaks open the gray and through the rain he can see the sheen of it off the distant roof of the car. He can't see the fire engine at all, and for some reason that's funny to him.

More lightning. It drowns out yells. He feels a hand clutch at his upper arm - bigger and stronger than Carol's, than Rick's. Tyreese's. He spares the man a glance and then focuses on his feet, on their movement, on how utterly soaked he is and how little he cares.

He doesn't know when there was last a storm like this. Not since the prison fell. After that, there were days of sullen rain and thick fog and chill that settled into the bones and made a home there, but there was never this, this torrential pounding thing. But thunder rolled in the distance the day they found the country club. Just rolled. Never came near. What if it had? What if the world had broken open that day, in just that place? Would things have been different? Does everything turn on tiny details like that? How close the thunder, how hard the questions, when one does or doesn't open a door?

So what would happen if he just stopped running now?

Tyreese doesn't give him a chance to find out. Maybe Tyreese can sense something and maybe he can't, maybe Rick said something about it and maybe he didn't, but at this point Daryl is just about being dragged bodily along, and if he had more motivation in general he might let Tyreese know what he thinks of that with a couple of sharp blows to the orbital bone. It's a moot point; he doesn't. There's nothing. Might as well keep on running.

It's what he does.

It's what he did. He did, for hours. For the whole night. For her. For nothing.

He's abruptly glad of the rain. It doesn't matter if he's crying. His vision is shot to hell anyway.

Except he _can_ see now, a little. A looming darker shape in the gathering gray darkness. They're heading straight toward it - did they see it from the road? Did he, before the rain got too heavy to see much of anything? He remembers darkness, a lot of it. But he also remembers water, and a light. Voices.

Not this water. Not these voices. And this, another stab of lightning and another, not this light.

"Here! _Here!_ "

A rattle, a squeal of hinges. The voices are sharper now, more focused. He sees guns raised, sees people bringing them up, and somehow his body knows how to keep going even when the rest of him wants to toss in every towel imaginable. It's not even new. At the crossroads, he could have just stayed where he was. He could have sat there with his head down and his hands loose in his lap and let the rough men do what they wanted. Kill him. Take everything. And he hadn't. He found his feet, found the trigger. He had been ready to kill to stay alive.

Of course, even then, he was staying alive for her. He has no idea what this is now. A hollow thing that gets the crossbow back in his hands and has him moving forward on his own, into the barn, looking down the sights. This is a frail cord and he doesn't even know what's pulling on the other end.

Looking for movement in the shadows, listening for that familiar groan-shuffle. None of either.

"Clear!"

He lowers the bow and just stands there, bereft without a purpose. All around him, they're moving again. He hears the voices of Abraham and his group, hears Rick saying something about securing the doors, Sasha and Michonne saying something back to him. It all seems distant. Unimportant.

Shimmer of black water. Dead eyes rolling. _Exactly how far down you think you can go, brother? How far down 'fore you ain't comin' up again?_

_You gonna look back? Or you just gonna shut your eyes and dive?_

"Daryl."

The voice is low, gentle, like the hand on his arm, but almost as tired as he feels, and more, as _thin_ as he feels, like there's just tissue paper over wounds gone septic. Old wounds that barely manage to give pain anymore.

He turns toward Carol and can't meet her gaze. Shakes his head. Squeezes his eyes shut when she reaches up and combs his wet hair away from his face. A shudder rolls through him but for the moment there's no more crying. It feels like there might not be any more crying, period. That part of him feels empty. Dry. Lost in the rain, in the dirt. Washed away.

Then he looks down at his hands and realizes they're clean. Clean enough. Not his clothes, no, but his hands. Her blood. The rain. His hands.

So even that's gone now.

This isn't crying. This is him collapsing, slowly, silently and with a bizarre kind of control, dropping the bow and then dropping to the floor.

Which is also not new.

_Everything is moving backward,_ he thinks, and he realizes he might actually be losing his mind. That _also_ wouldn't be new, and suddenly it's taking everything he has to keep from laughing hysterically. _Everything is looking over its own damn shoulder._

His eyes are still closed, though he hears people saying his name. He doesn't want them here. He wants to go back to where he packed the dirt under his nails, _her_ dirt watered with _her_ blood, and he wants to sit down there and finish the job he started at the crossroads. Do what he was too strong, then, to do.

He knows he's being pathetic. He's well aware. Yet, in the background of whatever remains of his mind, Merle is not snickering at him.

Merle is silent. Watching. Waiting with his hand on the tiller. Ready to head out into that black water.

"It's okay." Carol is pulling at him and he doesn't have the strength or the inclination to fight her. He sags against her and the rest of the world recedes. And she's still hurt - he doesn't give a shit about himself or really anyone else at this point but he's discovering that he does still care about her - and he's afraid he might hurt her worse, but when she curls her arms around him he lays his head on her shoulder and just...

Is. He is. He exists.

_Oh, God._

"Let him be," he hears her say to someone else. Her voice is rough in his ear, vibrating through her bones. "Just... Go on, I've got him. You can't do anything, let him be."

He wants to ask her things. He wants to ask her how she did this, with Sophia, and he wants to ask her to remind him how he did it with Merle. He wants to ask her to narrate to him how they both made it this far, how they kept moving all those times when the legs should have been cut out from under them and they should have gone down. He wants to ask her about how it was when she was alone - a thing, for him, out of the worst imaginable nightmare, the cruelest fate he can think of.

_You're gonna be the last man standing._ And when Beth said that, part of him - a healthy part - had wanted to grab her by the shoulders and drag her close, drag her against him just to feel how real and how _alive_ she was, and say _never fucking say that, never say that, never do it._

He doesn't know what _alone_ means anymore. And he's lost all sense of _standing._

Somewhere, lights are flickering to life. He's cold. Starting to shiver. Carol's hands are working through his hair, and the numbness that's stealing over him feels like a little bit of a blessing. He has no idea what or how to feel anymore, so maybe it's better if he just doesn't feel anything for a while.

Outside the storm goes about its business, droning on the roof. Somehow, against all sense - and maybe it's just that the world is slipping away again, or maybe it's the whole thing where he's losing his mind - it sounds like bees.

~

They found a hive, three days before they found the prison.

They used smoke to get the honey. Hershel knew how, and so did he, so he helped. It was calories, but more than that it was _honey_ , so they split the combs and for a moment of mass sugary insanity they ate them raw, casting away all squeamishness regarding the larvae, eating fast because they might have to run again at any moment.

Her, getting up off the grass, turning to ask her father about something. She put flowers in her hair, and he remembers thinking that was so fucking stupid, such a waste of time. Like the braid. But he never _really_ thought that. No.

He'd swear by the petals of a Cherokee Rose, he never did.

These weren't those flowers. They were dandelions, shit someone once would have poisoned to get off their lawn. But her hair was gold, and they were gold, and caught in a shaft of sunlight _she_ was gold, and she was laughing and licking a smear of golden honey off the side of her hand.

And for a fraction of a fraction of a second, everything in him lurched so sharply sideways that he almost felt sick.

There were things he couldn't think, so he didn't think them. Promptly forgot them. He could do that. Not erase things, but just put them behind a wall and leave them there. He did it a lot. It was a survival skill.

Drone of sleepy bees. A warm, sleepy afternoon in a time and a place where everything might have almost been okay. Her laughing at something he never heard, flowers falling out of her hair. A moment where the sun caught everything and held it like dust motes suspended in a beam. Then the walkers rose up around them and they had to run again, so they did. Ran and ran all the way to the gates, where all the guards and all their dogs were long gone, and only the dead wandered the tombs.

Now he remembers. Now, at the least convenient time, it returns. On his back in a barn that smells of old hay and the distant ghosts of manure-past, he listens to the rain-drone and thinks about honey on his tongue.

Looking back. Always looking back. There are so many things he might see, now, that he forgot he ever saw before. Now, when it's too late to do anything but hurt.

He can look back. But he's also looking down. Isn't he? Yes. The lights all go out at once. Everyone around him is gone like mist. The world inverts and suddenly there's nothing below him but darkness.

Darkness, and bloodless faces in the water, and the single light of a boat as it moves from shore to shore.


	3. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _hey, little songbird, cat got your tongue?_

_look back_

Fire. She was warm. It was warm, first time in days there was real warm, because even the sun was a thin imitation of what had been. Fire took the rest, ate it up, gave it to the dead. The world is a meat-grinder, she thought in bed with the knife pressed against her heart. The world has teeth. 

Now fire, soft singing. Fences. With people, with family. Afraid to hope, she was then, but fear never stopped her. Hope like a little flame. In bed with the knife, even then didn't die. Broke open the jaw, climbed out. Clawed her way to the top.

Light off the mirror shards. Through her tears, refracted. Rainbows on the ceiling. Her blood shining like gems. She said _I'm sorry._ Was she? Maybe. Maybe it was light to pass through, come out different on the other side. _Needs must, when the devil drives._

Always passing through blood, birth to death. 

_look back_

He hit the walker _beat up on walkers if it makes you feel better_ with the golf club, spattered her with it. Blood and bone and brains. One blow, struck it all down, covered her. Hole in one. She laughs. Around the fire, his eyes on her from the shadows. Felt them then, didn't meet them. Eyes that had a way of piercing. Said so much more than he did with words. Kept coming back to her, and maybe she wasn't so unhappy with that. Like he was trying to understand something. Like she was a puzzle. She was a problem to solve.

Strange man. Strange time. 

Hole in one, hole in her.

_Here's a riddle, songbird._ Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.

_Honey from a lion, little songbird._

Moonshine from a wolf.

Singing in the dark. She still does. Stirs and turns over in the soft deep. Somewhere there is thunder. In her head? Bees in her head. Honey on her hands, on her fingers. And his eyes. 

_And in them he carried her fire._

Down and down, singing all the way. Sending her song before her like a light. She wields it. She'll crash the gate. She'll break through the earth, claw her way back up just like before. Take his bloody hands. 

Clean them, every inch, with her rough lion's tongue.


	4. got the rain on tap at the bar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A river-crossing, a leavetaking, and what might have been and never was.

He sits in the boat, and it glides silently through the darkness.

It shouldn't - the outboard motor shouldn't allow that possibility - but it does. Somewhere - very far above, very distant - he can hear thunder, sullen rumbling, but it doesn't feel as if it has anything to do with him. Down here it's all quiet, the water is calm, and when he looks down into its black depths and sees drowned faces looking back at him, shapes fluid and indistinct in the light of Merle's lantern, he no longer feels any particular fear.

There's fear and then there's pain that smothers the fear, and he supposes that's a kind of mercy. It is, at the very least, some variety of advantage.

 _Lucky you family an' all, brother,_ Merle says from behind him. _Ain't got no coins on your eyes. Nothin' under your tongue. I'm waivin' the toll for you. Particularly good on me on account'a how you ain't even dead._

Isn't he? Daryl smiles - very faint, very thin - and doesn't turn. What this is... is not yet clear. But he feels that he needs to be here, in this dream or hallucination or madness or whatever the fuck it is. Before, he left here screaming, but now the pain that smothers the fear isn't paralyzing, isn't numbing him to the point of uselessness, and that's better than the alternative.

There's very little difference between where he was and where this is, as far as he can see.

He puts out a vaguely fascinated hand, reaches down toward the water, but Merle leans forward and swats his hand away. _Dumbass,_ he hisses. _Want 'em to drag you down? There's suicidal and then there's just plain fuckin' crazy._

Daryl shoots him a look. But for all he knows that's exactly correct.

He's not sure which one he is. Not yet.

 _How long's it take get across?_ he asks, and as he does, he realizes that he has no idea what _across_ would mean in terms of an outcome. He doesn't know what's there. Doesn't know why he's going. More darkness? More dead faces? Unfamiliar and familiar?

And suddenly he's looking down again, peering beneath the surface with a kind of desperation and a kind of terror that rears up like an angry snake and poisons the pain to death. Fear _of_ pain. Of what might happen if he sees what he wants and what he dreads.

He would dive if he saw her there. He would. Dive deep and never come up for air.

But Merle is talking as if nothing is happening. As if nothing is wrong. As if they're out on a normal lake on a normal day, no drunk asshole father and no drowned faces, sun shining and no walking corpses waiting for them on shore.

 _Depends. Sometimes don't take no time at all. Sometimes..._ He chuckles. _We could be out here for days. Better pray that ain't you. But you..._ Daryl tears his gaze away from the water and looks back, and Merle is watching him with his head cocked and his milky eyes keen. _You in some kinda hurry, ain'tcha? Cat with its tail on fire. 'Cause you in some kinda hurt._

Slowly, he shakes his head. _Don't do it, baby brother. Don't. Ain't worth it. You wanna go down, there's other ways._

No, there really aren't.

Daryl feels a sudden ache in his fingers and looks down. He's wringing his hands, hard, hard enough to make the bones crack. Threading his fingers through each other. Like hers. Hers in his. She took his hand that day and he didn't pull away, and he didn't want to, and that was so goddamn _new._

Her hand, reaching up out of the water like graceful white reeds. He would take it if he saw it. He would go down to her, fill his mouth and eyes with black mud, and he would go gladly.

_You don't know what this feels like, bro. You got no fuckin' idea._

_That what you think? You think you're the first person ever losin' someone? Get over yourself._

_Not like that,_ Daryl persists. _Not like that._

Merle sighs, leans back, and fixes him with a look he knows far too well. He's seen it far too many times. Profound exasperation, impatience, a total lack of surprise that he's so goddamn stupid - and affection, under it all. Affection for his dumbass little brother who can't fend for himself in any way, shape, or form.

 _All the world's that kinda loss now, brother. All the world's rottin' in the dirt. This ain't no different. You ain't no different._ He leans forward again, reaches out and touches the back of Daryl's hand, stills it. His touch is soft and cold. _She ain't no different._

 _No._ He knows, now. He knows. Not all of it. Some. Maybe enough. The river, the faces, the shore and what's on the other side of all this dark water. The soft, dark deep. What's waiting for him. What he'll do. Here, if up there won't let him.

_This is different. She's different. 'Cause I'm gonna find her._

_'Cause I'm gonna get her back._

_~_

Thunder breaks open the world.

There's no transition from being on his back to being on his feet. It just happens. He's half aware of a few bodies around him - sleeping, not dead, stirring and muttering to themselves - and dim light, and figures a little way away, behind one of the stalls, talking with their heads bent together. He sees friends, people he considers family, people he should stay with. People he should still be able to live for.

He looks down, and Carol is there. Pale, bruised, sleeping a foot or so away from where he was. She had stayed with him. She _would_ stay with him. He knows this.

But he can't. The rain took the blood away, so he has to go back to the rain.

He picks up the crossbow, slings it over his shoulder. He's insane. He's absolutely insane. and embracing that actually feels like the closest thing to good he might ever have again. Nothing really matters now, so he has the luxury of being so.

Hope was a stupid dream, a child's dream. Everyone dies ugly, bloody, and alone. So this isn't hope, no.

This is something much, much worse.

He turns, heads for the barn door. It's rattling now, the wind shaking it. Trying to get it open. If the storm chased them, now it wants them. It wants to swallow them up, take them down into the inky dark, and that sounds like a plan.

His hand is on the big iron handle when another hand closes on his arm, squeezes. Warning. He turns, fight rising up in him. He'll beat his way out if he has to.

"The hell're you doing?"

Michonne.

He can't quite look at her. He doesn't want to, feels like it might be dangerous. Like if he does, she'll see something in his eyes. Or _he'll_ see something. Something that makes him stay.

"Please," he says quietly, and then, sensing that this might not be adequate, "I need this."

What he needs, why... doesn't really bear going into.

She shakes her head. There's a little confusion there, but only a little; Michonne might argue, might push back, might fight, but she has a way of at least accepting the baseline logic of things, even when that logic is absolutely fucking crazy. Michonne appreciates crazy, he thinks. She always has.

"You need to get back over there and get some _sleep._ When was the last time you even had any? When'd you last eat something?" Her voice isn't loud, she isn't berating him, but she's pointing out facts and he doesn't know how to stop her. She moves closer, dropping her voice still more. "You can't keep runnin' yourself like this. You know that. You know what you're doing."

Yes, he does. So he keeps his hand on the door, he meets her eyes, and he puts everything he has into it. Everything he is. Everything he was and could have been and will now never be. He sucks at words, he always has, but there are times when he thinks he manages to do something in spite of that. Get around it somehow. Make what he _doesn't_ say more important, more real.

Michonne _gets_ crazy. In a way maybe no one else does.

"Please."

She looks at him for a long time. Glances past him, and he knows without having to look back that she's marking where the others are, whether anyone is looking at them.

And she lets go of him. Steps aside.

"Don't do this," she whispers, even as he hauls the door open - just a bit, quiet as he can, but surely they'll hear. They might chase him. That would be _so_ fucking bad on the part of literally everyone. "Daryl... Just don't. Don't do it."

The rain beats in, spatters against his face. It's cold, and it immediately seems to soak him far beneath the skin. It penetrates, pushes into him. It feels like it's changing him from the inside out, in ways that aren't clear but will become so.

"Sorry," he murmurs, and steps out into the storm.

He looks back, once. She's standing in the doorway, silhouetted in light, a beloved shadow. For a fraction of a second he almost goes back to her. Back to them. He doesn't have to do this. He doesn't have to go down and down.

Yes, he does.

"Don't let 'em follow me," he says, and when he turns back into the storm it eats him alive.

~

The thunder outside the country club - it never became anything. But if the sky had opened up that day it would have beaten away the heat, would have washed them clean. He was in the dark, then, angry with something that went beyond heat and into cold stone, something dull and useless, but he followed her little point of light, because what else did he have? Because he took her with him when, in those last moments before they ran, he perceived that she was all he had left.

God, he was so fucking stupid.

But if the sky had opened up that day maybe he could have been smart about things. Maybe everything would have been different. Maybe the rain would have found them but it wouldn't have driven them inside. They could have stayed out in it and nothing would have been able to touch them. They could have run through it, and it wouldn't have been running just to stay alive. She would have been soaked, her shirt plastered to her skin and her hair in heavy tangles, and maybe she would have laughed. Maybe she would have spread her arms and turned in a circle, her mouth open, drinking the sky.

He can see her like that, when he looks back. Never a man prone to fantasies, he can lose himself in them now. All the shameful things he never would have admitted to himself or to anyone else, ever - he can look back and see them as they might have been.

If the sky had opened up that day, maybe he would have been able to let everything else go. He was a piece of shit who did shitty things, who couldn't get anything right, who never said what he meant to say and said all kinds of things he didn't mean, but if the rain had taken him maybe it would have made him better, made him worthy. Maybe, if the sky had opened up that day, he would have touched her shoulder, touched her back, turned her toward him. Maybe, with the courage that comes with being so wet you can't get any wetter, he could have curled his hands into her hair, traced the pattern of her braid with his fingers. Maybe he could have pulled her closer and pressed his lips to her forehead, and tasted the rain on her brow. On her mouth.

If the sky had opened up that day, maybe he would never have let her go.

Maybe she would still be with him now.

Now he moves in circles in the rain, his head tilted back, oblivious to anything else. If a walker came on him now, he would be dead - he knows this. He also knows it won't happen. This is the storm that almost came to them that day when the sky didn't open up; for this long it's been tracking them, tracking _him,_ and now that it's found him it won't let him go.

It has her blood. He'll pierce its eye, its heart, make whatever deal he has to make to take back what's his.

All the way down and back again.


	5. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _you won't feel a thing, he said, when you go down_

_look back_

Can't. Nothing behind. Dark earth and her hands break. Not on themselves, on what it takes to get _through._ She must. Earth into mud, all around, and the bees in her head buzzing louder louder louder into pain. Before there was no pain. Liked that, knows it now. Grit in her mouth, in her nose. She could drown in this. Go down to the dead faces, swim in the deep of the deeps. 

Little light, far above. Moving. Hand reaching down. Reach up, take it. Thread her fingers through his. 

_No._

He isn't there.

Can't cry in the mud, only make more. Coughing, like funeral cotton in her mouth. Thunder startles the bees into silence. He was there, before. Faded blue, shifting trees. All gauze, all through mist, like morning. Like waking up. Sunlight on her pillow, always loved. Her own bed, ashes now. Her bed that followed, rotting alone. All her beds, she's always leaving them. They can never hold her. 

Reach up into the water. Catch and pull. With what? There's nothing left of her.

_Ruffled feathers, little songbird. Nowhere to fly._

Screaming? Maybe. Her throat is all raw choking. Screaming and singing are not so very different. Used both, when either was needed, because she's not afraid. She made it. Screaming _it's BULLSHIT_ at him. Giving as good as she got. Not backing down. Rushing forward, holding on. Taking his back. Scared little songbird hides a lion under its wings. Saw how shocked he was, on his heels with his eyes wide. Saw something else, later. He loosened against her. Released against her hands, her body, and she felt his need.

What she saw. His eyes.

_The lion shall lie down with the wolf,_ songbird.

More, later. Don't have time. So much water, trying to pull her down with cool, slick fingers.

_look back_

She can't. If she does she'll die. 

Again. 

Thunder a drum-pound. It beats her through. Air. Too much; it hurts her. She hurts everywhere. Cries again, tears into the rain, claws hooked into the earth. Kicking mud. Almost swimming. Drowned hands behind, groping. Doesn't have to look back to see, but she won't go down to them. She won't. 

_You can't have me._

Birth is all push and shove and pain. She's done this before. Doing it for herself, all alone. _I am strong._

Yes, little songbird. Little lion.

On her back now, looking up. Wet grass, swaying treetops. Lightning spiderwebs out of the dark. The world is water but she isn't drowned. Not down and down. 

She opens her mouth and drinks the falling sky. It tastes like copper and iron. Tastes like blood.


	6. I hear that high and lonesome sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flood waters rise, and a road is a road no longer.

The world is a spiral staircase.

It always is. Spirals are everywhere - flowers, shells, galaxies and spinning stars, and the way he goes now. The thought lurches through his head as he lurches through the rain; he has a vague idea of where he’s going, though it’s more than half instinct. There is the sense that too much thinking is only going to get in his way. But the sky spirals overhead and distracts him, badly. It turns and turns. He thinks of stairs going up and also stairs going down, of something iron and potentially worn slippery. Potentially dangerous.

A piece of the storm, spiraling downward out of the sky and tearing up the ground when and where it touches. It doesn’t happen, but once he stops and shields his eyes from the rain, and he might be able to convince himself that it does.

He moves on. If he can find the road, if the road isn’t completely washed out, it’ll take him back to her.

He has no idea what he’ll do when he gets there.

Part of him is still rational. That part isn’t Merle, because Merle is dead, but when it speaks it sounds a little like Merle might sound if Merle was a little bit less of an asshole. It isn’t literally _speaking_ , of course, because it’s the rational side, but it’s giving him ideas. Sending him impulses in the opposite direction. _Go back, you fuckin’ idiot. Go back, dry off, get warm, sleep. You’re alive. Hurt or not, you need to stay that way._

_She would want you to stay that way._

That makes him want to snarl at himself – for all the good that would do, though it might make him feel the tiniest bit better. What she would _want…_ She’s dead, it doesn’t matter what she would want. Anyway, wouldn’t she want to be alive? Wouldn’t that be first and foremost on her mind? Sort of her number one priority? Because that would be his guess.

_Oh, and you’re really gonna fix that? Just wind everything back, pull the bullet out through her head and patch it all up? Slap on a band-aid? You’re not God, Daryl Dixon._

Like there is one.

There’s a thin line ahead that might be a road. Might be. His road? He doesn’t recall seeing another one. His boots are full of water; as in his memory, the memory that twisted into one of the cruelest fantasies imaginable, there’s a freedom in that. In being so wet you can’t get any wetter. You can only go up from there, so might as well make the best of being down that far.

_Might as well make the best of it._

When rain washes into his mouth it takes on a distinctly alcoholic bite.

Lighting. Flash, _boom._ But it’s further away now. When he looks up he sees a finger of it snake down and touch the ground. It’s not pointing in the direction he’s sure he needs to go but for an instant he feels the impulse to follow it anyway.

There are going to be a lot of distractions along the way, he intuits – he doesn’t know why. If this is something he’s not supposed to be doing, there are things that will place themselves in his path, and he’ll have to navigate around them. He’s done that before. He did it, to find her. He jumped every hurdle, he dodged every pit. He was careful. When Rick wanted to go in hot, he advocated a cooler head. His aim was solid and true. He kept himself together. He did everything right.

He didn’t grab her when he could have.

When he _knew_ something was wrong. When he perceived something horrible approaching, oncoming, already fired and impossible to turn back. He froze up with that knowledge like a nightmare, didn’t grab her, and the nightmare had a nightmare end.

The first time he’s really let himself realize that.

He stops in his tracks, facing the thing he’s now certain is the road, staring at it, heedless of the water dripping into his eyes. He didn’t grab her. He could have grabbed her and he didn’t grab her, and now she’s in the ground.

He lets out a low, hollow moan. The drone of the rain takes it and carries it away. He can’t look back. But he also can’t stop.

He plods forward again.

He wants to be back in the boat with Merle. That was helpful, in an extremely perverse way. He had someone to talk to besides himself, and the company was familiar if not altogether agreeable. And it was good. It was good to have it, to be there. He misses his brother. It’s a secret he’s only shared with her, and he didn’t have to say it for her to know it, and she didn’t judge him. Didn’t tell him he shouldn’t feel that way. She looked at him, into him, and she knew him.

She knew too much. He wonders, following the pale band that swims before his eyes, if she knew everything. If she was an oracle. If she was speaking prophecy.

_You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon._

He almost stops again. But he doesn’t. She’s dead, there shouldn’t be any real sense of urgency, but there is. He can’t waste time. Maybe this is what’s going to place itself in his way; maybe it’s just _pain_ , blow after blow of it, blame after blame, and _God_ isn’t there plenty of that to dish out. Fuck the self-congratulation, everything he supposedly did right before he did that final thing wrong, because what it comes down to is that he fucked up, just like he _always_ does, and someone else got killed.

Not just _someone else,_ no. No.

The pale band appears to be only feet away now. It might be accomplishing something, if he can just reach it, set one foot in front of the other. Each step taken one less to make. He’s close enough to see its width now, its form, and when lightning breaks the sky open and sends shards of light everywhere, he sees…

Waves. Rapids, almost.

He _does_ stop. He has to, or he’ll walk into it. He looks at it, numb, half disbelieving. Somehow the road had come to mean everything. It had been a promise that, once fulfilled, would open everything else to him, swing wide the gates and scoop the loose earth away.

But it’s a fucking river.

It was the road, once. Maybe. But it doesn’t matter what it _was_ , because it isn’t a road now. Water pours down it, flowing high into the grass of the embankments on either side, turning them marshy. He’s standing in it now, not only water but sucking mud.

This is what sent them running. Flood waters, rising high.

A hissing groan from his left, a rattle. He doesn’t need to be particularly aware to deal with it, not by now. He doesn’t bother with the bow; he turns with his knife already in his hand, swings it up, catching the thing neatly between the eyes. Another hiss, a splatter of dark blood, and in the next flash of lightning he sees its body tumbling down the embankment and lost in the surging waters.

Just one. He looks at where it was for a while, looks down at his knife. The rain is already washing it clean.

This rain is thirsty. It wants all blood. It won’t turn even dead blood away.

When he looks at the river again, in the next cut of hard light, it’s not pale. It’s black.

He turns right, sheathes his knife, and begins to follow it. South. He’s moving south.

He’s moving down.


	7. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _cast your eyes to heaven, you get a knife in the back_

_look back_

She won’t. She can’t. Up and up – force herself against the wet earth. Mud between her fingers. Grit in her mouth, in her eyes. Hurts to see – when the lightning flashes, cracks against her head like a whip. Never been whipped but she was beaten. Knows what that feels like. Beats inside her head, the rain and the thunder. Scream against it, but her throat burns.

So thirsty. Her cracked lips. _Open your mouth, songbird. Feed at the hand of the storm._

But push. Up. Can’t stay here. Too close, get pulled down again.

Rolls over, hands flat, pushing and pushing, up to her knees. The ground shifts and she wobbles. Every lightning strike is a pulse through her head, her heartbeat, drumbeats, beating wings.

_If he came now. Flew down, songbird. Carried you in his arms._

He won’t come. None of them will. Her face twists and oh, it _hurts._ It all hurts _so much._ But hurt means she can’t be dead and that’s strength. Gets her on her feet, gets her standing. Dead walk but don’t feel pain. She knows. Killed enough of them, blood on her. First blood, last blood to her. Knives, guns.

His bow. Fingers curl around an invisible trigger. _I’m gettin’ good at this._

_Pretty soon I won’t need you at all._

Lies or truth, songbird?

She almost goes down again _teeth on her foot up from the ground, went down but he was there always there_ catches herself on her own feet. Own ankle. The ground is a traitor – can’t trust it but have to use it. All she has, now that she’s free of it. Turn. Stay up, steady. So much rain, and she knows what exposure is, knows you can die from it, die even if you’ve died once already, and then she’ll get up again and walk and walk. And eat.

 _Walk._ Can’t fly. Only walk. She turns, hugging herself. _Walk and the road will open._

One step. Another.

_look back_

Shakes her head. Mistake, the hurt comes back and she almost cries out – maybe does, eaten by thunder. Very close now. Get away, get away, find some quiet. Hide from the beating. She bore up under it before, didn’t let it beat her. She fought. Made it.

_I am strong._

Again, the beating wings. Knows it can’t be him but looks up, and that’s when the lightning stabs down before her and splits the tree right down the middle with a _crack_ like every gun going off at once. She stumbles back, hands on her head, spots in her eyes all purple and green like flowers. Does scream now, screams and screams.

His name. Maybe.

But the tree is a fireburst. It’s all heat. Bent over, but she raises herself. Daddy’s book, always carried it, read to her, his sweet voice, and he’s _gone gone gone_ but she thought maybe he was close and if she was in the ground and down so far he was close then as well. Helped her out. Could be. Lifted her up until she could dig her own way.

_But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint._

Not the Lord. But she can.

_I am strong._

She stands before the fire, stands straight. Won’t bend. Won’t fall. Won't flee. _Can’t rely on anyone for anythin'._ This is true. Even him. Wants to, believed it… But she can’t. _No one's coming._ Only one coming for her is her. 

_The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion._

She lifts a hand to the fire, raises a single finger, and her laughter is like roaring in her ears.


	8. in the dark to where she lay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darkness comes, rivers into roads and the building of walls.

He walks and the darkness gathers.

It should have been there already - and indeed he thought it was. He thought, when he began making his way along the road the river swallowed and which it had remade, that everything was as dark as it could be, that he had reached the worst of it and that it, like the water, couldn't take any more of him. But he was wrong.

He's been wrong about so many things.

Lightning no longer breaks it, though the thunder keeps rolling. It's just blackness ahead and behind and all around, roaring in his ears in harmony with the roaring of the water. It makes him dizzy, raises vertigo in him, and he stumbles but he doesn't go down.

The bow has never been heavy but it is now. More than once in the last hour - _more than one? many? has it been days?_ \- he considered dropping it and leaving it behind. He's no longer sure it can serve him and that feels like treason. But he's in the position of needing to lighten a load. He's in the position of looking very carefully at everything that weighs him down. If he's going to make his way to the other side, the other shore, and continue on, he'll need to be light. He'll need to float for her.

He'll need to find his wings and fly.

He senses - but doesn't see - trees rising up on one side of him, and he feels as if he's being herded closer to the edge of the embankment. Closer to the water. He's not ready for that, not yet. And Merle said there were other ways. He shrugged that off, but maybe it's worth going back to. Maybe that, too, is worth reconsidering.

God, he's already so tired.

He was always tired, with her. Not before the prison but after. Running and running, tearing up the ground. If anyone had been trying to track them it would have been so easy, and maybe part of him had been aware, had been hoping and trying to make it so. _Find us. Find us._ And no one did. No one came. It was just them, all alone.

And then that was all right. That was okay.

But he was always tired. He never would have believed that walkers _\- walkers,_ for fuck's sake - could force them into so much running. Sometimes he wondered if the running was really necessary, if they were putting themselves into situations where they had to because when you were running there was little time to stop and think. Not _they,_ though. _Him._ Because for him, the times when they stopped were the worst. The times by the fire, everything quiet, his breathing and her breathing and their hearts not racing, not trying to catch up with them. Then, even when she had been so angry at him for his silence, he hadn't been able to make himself shut up.

She looked at him, her face and hair red and gold in the firelight, and inside he had been screaming and he hadn't been able to stop.

She knew. _She knew._

There was always the fire, always the dark, and now there's no fire and he stumbles blindly toward where he knows she has to be, no idea how close he is now but he won't stop. He'll go back to her. He never should have left. He could have kept carrying her. He would have carried her until they tore her away from him at the point of a gun, and then he would have fought them with his nails and his teeth to get her back.

And the thought that they might have done such a thing to him isn't worse than anything else that's crossed his mind since he started this insanity, but it's just about as bad as almost any of it.

Are the trees still trees? His head is down and he hasn't looked directly at them, his wet hair hanging in his eyes and mostly obscuring the very little he can still see, but now he lifts his head and palms water away, blinks, tries to focus. He doesn't see spaced trunks. He doesn't see gaps. There's no lightning but there's a flash of something, a flare, and he's looking at high concrete walls, tangles of barbed wire.

The river is no longer a river. Once more, it's a road.

He steps onto it, and though now each step is a little easier, the bow is lead at his back. This thing that should save him. That saved both of them so many times.

He could have saved her. He could have. Just killed them all before anything else happened. Done what Rick said. Not been an idiot, not taken things into his own hands, because when did that ever get him anywhere? Merle gave him so much shit for it but when did he ever get anywhere by growing a pair of balls? Doesn't take balls to kill. Just takes aim.

He could have saved her if he just ignored everything she ever taught him.

The darkness gathers but somehow the road is lit. Illuminated from beneath like a glowing spine. Behind the wall, low and mournful, comes the baying of dogs.

~

He keeps coming back to when he fell down in the grass beside her. It wasn't a moment for this, they were so exhausted and so terrified and it wouldn't have been right and she would never have let him and he's _never_ wanted anything like this from anyone, but now, _in extremis_ , he can't keep the thought out of his mind.

Like the rain, like the sky opening up, but he wouldn't want that here.

It would have been suicide, but in his mind, looking back, he can control it all. He can protect them both. He can turn over, press her down into the grass, look at her and let her see what's already burning deep in the pit of him, infernal, and what might soon be fanned into flame. He could have done that and she would have reached for him, and he would have been able to discover how she tasted. How she felt, skin under his hands, softer and warmer than anything else he was ever allowed to have. She would have let him in, let him explore her, opened to him. Grass and breeze would have been everything they needed.

_Maybe we stick around here for a while._

No. They never could have stayed anywhere.

But he could have been gentle. He could have been so good to her. He could have gotten it right. He needs to believe that. But even if he finds her now, he won't get that chance again.

He can look back, sure.

Doesn't mean he gets to go there.


	9. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I want a nice soft place to land, I want to lie down forever_

_look back_

No, fuck you.

Becoming aggravating. Walking is bad enough. Teeter-totter, stumble, don't fall. Roots and branches. Rain, still rain; still drinks it, because her throat is so dry. Surrounded by wet and inside she's still so dry, scraped out, raw. Not as bad as her head. Head a fucking nightmare, all full of fire the rain can't put out. Don't touch it, don't touch - but she does, can't not. There is a great deal of fascination. Her own blown-out skull in the back, hair caked with blood. But getting washed clean. That might be a good thing, the blood is ugly, too close to a dead thing. She doesn't have to see it to know.

She's not walking dead, no no no.

Face hurts too. She feels lines crossing, her cheek, her forehead. New - are they? No, she knows them, even if her own body is strange to her now. Second one she remembers, she does; broken across her head, nasty surprise though she should maybe have seen it coming. Felt hate like never before. Not even the man who killed Daddy.

Head rolling. Her head, rolling back on her neck. Rocked back, spine snapped like a whip. Lightning crash through her forehead.

Her face is a map. Every place she's been. Her face, her body.

Him, too. Him, every mark on him. The scars, the ink. Always very interesting. Never said. Never could have said. What he would have thought. She didn't want to know - some things better not to know. But always looking at him. Looking when he didn't know.

Catching him looking, sometimes.

But her ankle hurts, hurts all cracked and splintered even though for a while it stopped _and was it ever that bad?_ and she wants him here. Cries a little thinking about it, gets angry at the crying. He carried her. Carried her when he didn't have to. Seemed to delight in it, she thinks now. Seemed to look for excuses. To carry her and to be strong for her, to show her what maybe he couldn't say.

She's looking back. No, can't. Keep walking. Forward and forward. Left foot right foot left foot right foot and never mind how much it hurts.

_look back_

God, go _away._

Trees all around her, leafless. Rising. Branches like fingers - that's a cliche but doesn't mean it's not also true. Reaching for her to stop her. Get back in the ground she should, she shouldn't be walking around unless she's also dead, and shot in the head, bullet, _bang,_ that means no more getting up and walking. She holds her hands up against the trees and tells them _get the fuck away from me_

_Clipped your wings, little songbird._

She has no wings. Never did. He had the wings. Not an eagle but he carried her. Not an angel. She's not stupid enough to think he is. Demon on the inside of his arm - wanted to trace those lines with her finger, over and over.

_Thought all kinds of things you shouldn't, songbird. All kinds of songs you shouldn't sing._

_Wanted him to_ make _you sing, ha ha. Not a good girl, all grown up._

It's teasing her. She hates it, it's bad. Doesn't know what it is. But it sounds a little like him, the bad man who killed Daddy. Everything about him was bad. Only one eye, concentrated all the poison in the second one. She thinks of squeezing it like a pimple, popping it and running all down his face. Nice idea. She'd hurt him now if she could. She's not a songbird anymore. She has claws and teeth. In the woods now, doesn't have to be afraid. Not singing. Roar at the dark.

No noise, though. Bring them walking to her.

_I sing. I still sing._

no you don't you fucking liar

Get herself out of the dark. Out of the wet. She's shivering, hugging herself. She's supposed to be strong - all the lion gone out of her all at once. Just a girl. Just another dead girl.

_he never believed that he never did_

Moan in the dark, shuffle shuffle. Knows she can't fight, fear a hand around her throat tight enough to bruise. Everything clear all of a sudden, even in the dark. Turn aside, into the bushes. Tree-arms closing over her. They won't hear her over the rain-drums. They won't see. The dark can be good to her.

Cover her like he did. Got her back. Take her back.

Back against the tree, rough and scratching. She draws her knees up against her chest and closes her eyes. She wants to sleep now, even while the dead things shuffle past, mumbling dead words to themselves. So far down still, all she wants to do is sleep and dream about him.

 _Every night she dreamed those things, in that narrow hospital bed, clutching her pillow. She turned away from the creepy clock poster on the wall, chased the dreams. All her family back with her, holding onto her - not just Maggie and Daryl But Rick, Judith, Carl, Michonne, Tyreese, Sasha, Carol also, Carol, oh_ God _Carol Carol dying in the bed but then she didn't die. She got better. Everyone with her and everything all right again._

Did hold her. They all did. After, holding her and crying. But before, him, sitting there cradling her in his lap, blood all over him, on his mouth, tears on her face. She knows he did because she remembers it. Wasn't a dream.

Carried her into the sun. She loved him for that. Loves him. She'll say it. Loves him, loves him so much, should have told him before it was too late. Loved him and left him. Twice.

She lays her head down on her knees and pushes away the pain and sobs, silent, the dead all around her.

_Very good, songbird. What wonderful progress you're making._

"Daryl. Daryl, _please._ "

 _No one's coming._ No one, ever, forever.

_look back_

She doesn't want to die anymore.


	10. he covers the world in the color of rust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turning away from the road, toward the light and farther down.

The sun is rising.

He's almost sure, to the extent that he's sure of anything at the moment. There is, in any case, a bit more light, colorless and flat breaking through the sheets of rain. Except those are no longer sheets. The rain is subsiding into something softer, gentler - almost kind in comparison to what it was. The roaring torrent to his left that was a road isn't roaring quite as loudly now. The water is lowering. Soon, he thinks in the vaguest possible way, it might be a road again.

The thing about flash floods is that they're quick. Though this one has gone on for an unusually long time.

A river, a road. He thinks once again about boats, slogging along in the mud with his boots full of water. Merle in the boat, that awful pained smile. Is Merle still there? No, somehow he left Merle behind a while ago, a ways back. He left Merle on the shore.

He left Merle on the shore with a knife in his head.

That jars him. Snaps him back into focus with the lingering afterimage of Merle's dead eyes, milky-white gone to black spots when Daryl closes his eyelids. He can't afford to look back like that. He can't afford to get lost in what's behind him, not in the endless downward spiral.

Not downward, though. Cutting straight across. This is flat land, Georgia farmland. He doesn't even remember any hills between the barn and the place where they put her in the ground.

But he looks to his right and there _is_ a wall. Concrete and rusting barbed wire. It's a simple and undeniable fact, rising beside him, bone-colored in the bloodless light.

It stretches out along the road without any apparent end, trapping him into a thin stretch of ground between the water and itself. Even when it's the road again, he somehow thinks he'll still be trapped.

Soggy groans back on the left. He looks and sees scattered bits of walkers caught on snags, impaled on spears of branches and broken scrap wood. Crushed against trunks. Hardly any intact - he sees them in halves, missing arms and legs, entire torsos. He sees one that's just a dangling snake of a spine and a hissing, snapping head. All of their eyes seem to be following him, and the ones who still have arms seem to be reaching.

He stares at them, crossbow loose in his hand. So these are the faces in the black water. The dead faces. The dead hands reaching up for him, beckoning for him to join them. Suggesting it as if it was a tempting offer, and they nearly timed it right because once it would have been, before he determined to sail over them and get her back.

The thing about insanity is that it relieves you of a tremendous number of obligations. Or you can look at it that way, if you want. The extraneous is very easy to dismiss. Everything that isn’t her vanishes in a kind of tunnel vision. The dead are horrible as they’ve always been, but he also knows they won’t touch him. They’re smashed and broken by the water, and for the first time he wonders if the water is in fact a gift from somewhere. From someone. If maybe it’s here to give him a hand.

That’s a comforting thought even if it’s probably bullshit.

So increasing light, swelling in front of him, a rising sun behind an obscurity of clouds. He’s not sure whether or not _that_ part is a gift, but it’s good to be able to see a little better.

Is he going to have to pay for these things? Nothing is free. He already suspects he’ll have to pay very dearly when he finds her. Everything he got beforehand - every minute, every precious second with her in the firelight and the candlelight with sugar in his mouth but also before, in the times when all they did was run. Even that was sweet. Losing her works backward and twists everything into new shapes, and looking over his shoulder reveals a world he’s only now realizing was there all along.

That world, she changed. Changed again when she fell away from it. Everything she gave him – he thought he already paid for it through the loss of her, but now he’s not so sure. Something that good has to be costly, and maybe he hasn’t suffered enough yet, and that’s before he even gets to the part where he has to pay for her return.

So sure that part is even possible. But why wouldn’t it be? To his left, all the ruins of the walking dead and all of them are still alive enough to see him and be hungry. He’s used to thinking of this world as a place where sooner or later everything is torn away but maybe that’s all wrong.

Maybe this is a world where sooner or later you get everything back. If you can look. If you can pay.

Merle in the boat with his hand still on the tiller, face all twisted into that familiar _you are such a fucking dumbass_ expression. _How’s about you get over yourself and think clear, much as you can._

 _She worked her way into you, brother. Got her claws hooked into your skin. Not sayin’ she meant to. If anythin’ that’s on you. You let her. Wanted it, even. All that time out there with her, lettin’ her become everythin’, you thought you started gettin’ your head back when you found your_ family _but you know how empty you were. Not kiddin’ yourself no more._

 _You started losin’ it on that road, man. At the_ crossroads. _Watchin’ her go, that was just the straw that broke your back. Kicked your legs out from under you. Now all you can do is crawl._

Maybe when he dropped onto the gravel he slipped into unconsciousness and this whole thing has been one big nightmare.

That would make a certain amount of sense.

He stops, swaying in the flat morning light. He still hasn’t found her blood, and he knows now that he won’t. It’s lost to him. But he refuses to believe that _she_ is. He turns away from the dead and looks up at the wall. It’s no road, and he hates the look of it, but it’s a straight line to follow. Walls have always been significant – building them, getting behind them, doing whatever needs to be done to keep them standing.

Facing whatever comes to tear them down.

He moves closer to it, lays his hand against its roughness and feels that he’s a little more _in_ the world. He hasn’t slipped away. He can hold himself together, just long enough. Long enough to make it all the way down. Long enough to get to her and drag her out of the ground.

This is very morbid. Morbidity is just sort of how things currently go. It’s a feature of being alive, like lying down in a coffin and declaring it _comfy._

_And oh, if she laid down there too. If she laid herself down beside you, curled against your side, you could have held her and pulled the lid closed and dreamed with her in the dark._

This is not Merle.

This might be Carol.

Fear clutches at his gut. He didn’t want her to follow him here. It’s almost like she’s singing to him, singing him a lullaby – he never heard her sing, he has no idea how she’d sound, but he wishes he had.

_You already wanted to die, didn’t you? After, at first, when you couldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t. She was across something yawning between you like a mouth and you couldn’t reach her. Then it closed and she showed you how to live again, but you never really stopped wanting it. Not all of you. Once you get a taste of suicide you never really forget._

_She knew. She knows. How that is._

He slams a fist against the wall and his knuckles bleed. The pain is grounding.

Okay. Okay, so he’ll keep going.

He slings the crossbow over his back again and starts to walk the wall. The ground is higher here and therefore drier. The growls and hisses of the dead recede. The light grows and grows, though it doesn’t gain any color. Everything is still gray. After a while the wall turns at a sharp angle, away from the road, and he stops and considers. He should stick to the road. The road is the way they came. The road should lead him back.

But he’s not sure. Logic doesn’t feel entirely trustworthy. And something is tugging at him.

Her claws in him. Not just claws. Fishhooks. He was in the river and she cast for him, lured him, caught him and pulled him out. Taught him to breathe. He should trust that tug. The road is now choked with the dead.

He turns, hand still against the concrete. Before him more trees, but it seems like they open up a short way ahead. He can see more brightness. Something clear.

_If you’re gonna lay down, little brother, you make sure that bed is comfy._

All right. So here. Unquestioning trust, when he has no reason to feel any such thing.

_Wouldn’t kill you to have a little faith._

That’s hilarious.

Daryl follows the light.


	11. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _but if all you got is your own two legs you best be glad you got em_

_look back_

Wakes her. She doesn't even realize what it's said at first, because there's light when she opens her eyes. Makes her close them again. Light hurts, but this isn't fire and isn't the storm. Still rain, still wet - but still not dead. 

She thinks. 

Stiff. Hurt everywhere. She remembers - she can remember, brain coming back like a maze, running through and trying to find the pieces of itself. Scattered, scattered like the glass on the bathroom floor, scattered and bloody - but the glass could be made whole again. Fit all the pieces together. She can be whole. She knows she can.

She's trying. And she _does_ remember. The mud and the clawing-up and then the dead, dead all around. Hiding. Before that the fire. Laughing at it, because fire is _hers._ She's not afraid of fire. Afraid of lots of things, but not afraid of fire because she _made_ the fire and even if she has no wings he carries her over it. Wings spread. Wings like eagles. Glide up on the pillars the hot air makes. 

This is all physics. She muses on it, and she listens. 

No dead. Not anymore. Just rain, soft, and wind, and when she tries to open her eyes again there's light still and not so much hurt. 

Sky. Day. 

He carried her into the sun. She remembers that. That's a piece on the floor, glittering, bloody. A big piece. Sharp enough to cut. Her body is still sitting in the rain, absolutely still, her arms wrapped around her knees, but in her mind she kneels on that broken-glass floor and she lifts that shard in her hands and looks. 

His face. 

_Can't do this now, songbird. This is more looking back than you can afford._

All these voices. 

There are other faces in those other shards, and she wants to stay here, wants to pick them all up one by one and look at them in this odd rainlight and run her hands over their edges, add her new blood to the blood already there. She can bleed. Maggie is crying and screaming and falling down, there are tears in Rick's eyes that he won't let fall, and she wants to cut herself to show them.

See, I can bleed, if I was dead I couldn't do that so I'm alive so stop crying, please, I'm so wet already so stop crying. 

_Get up, songbird. Get flying. Long way to go._

_Everybody's got a job to do._

Legs hurt, for a moment worse than anything else, but she gets them under her and pushes. Up, up, and the blood in her head changes and swells in waves and she moans. Throwing up, no, can't do that, anyway nothing to throw up. Pushing like that, push more blood into the head, hurt even worse. 

_Hold all those broken pieces together. All those broken pieces of you._

Waver and bend. Bend in the wind, under weight, not break. Not more broken. She's going to be whole. 

Out of the bushes and back in among the trees.

Quiet except for the rain. No groan-hiss of dead. No birds, no rustle of animals. Listen, walk soft. Eyes on the ground. She sees them, clear - weaving tracks, uneven and unsteady. All their interweaving paths. She remembers this. This is another fragment she picks off the floor, smaller and thin and sharp like a knife. Pointed like a bolt. She can aim with it, but the point is not to shoot. The point is for the guiding of herself. 

Tracking.

_I'm gettin' good at this._

Stand and look. See. Follow. Way he explained it to her, actually very simple. It was all there. All right there. Nothing to search for. Nothing to work out. All just right there, only most people don't see.

By the fire the night after the shack burned. Talking to her, more than he had before, easier. Running his hands over an array of twigs like the tracery of dark ribs. _People look but they don't see. All you gotta do is see. Turn on your eyes. The rest is all there. Just know what you're lookin' at. That's it. Ain't no more complicated than that._

Smiling a little while he told her. Sharp, that piece. Cuts her. 

Grip it. Grip it and bleed. 

_look back_

Now she has to.

_Make it your claws, songbird. Make it the thorn in your paw and let it drive you. No limping for you. Not now. Track and hunt and run._

Walkers, all. All around here. Heading that way, heading for...

Been moving. Didn't mean to. Following this track and didn't want to - doesn't want walkers, how stupid is that? She doesn't want to be dead again after everything she's been through to not be dead. Sigh, breath goes in and out _isn't it wonderful to be able to do that without a mouth full of mud_ and more lifesign, that's very good, but she has to turn around because she should go away from walkers, go away from where they are...

There's a road. 

Yes, look at it and be sure. Road, but also water. Lots of it, running... River, she thinks it might be, yes. Before, when the rain was harder and more. Road and river together, and she laughs at that because it's like a joke, like a riddle. But jokes and riddles aren't the same. Jokes are stupid funny. Riddles are...

Riddles are puzzles. Riddles are made of signs. All there. 

_Just gotta know how to read 'em._

When is a road not a road? 

_look back_

So she does, over her shoulder, along the river-road, and there they are. Tracks. Not walkers, she can see right away, so clear, like it shines like the glass like the light now. Right there for her. Single track, heavy, too even to be dead. Moving alive. Slow. Tired. 

On and on. 

Going where?

Lifts her head, ignores the throb. This is sharper than that, makes a knife of her. Makes her a bolt, a bullet, a thing that can aim and fly. 

_Go hunting, little lion. All the pieces of you, red in tooth and claw._

And no more looking back. It's all there, ahead of her. There to follow, like he said, because she can see. Find herself. The rest of the pieces. 

Hunt them and find them and be whole.


	12. all alone his blood runs thin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walls, fences, an unexpected visit from an old friend.

He remembers walls.

He remembers walking walls. Fences. Barriers. He should never have trusted them - came from an early age to regard them with profound suspicion - but when the world fell apart they started meaning something else, and the truth is that maybe he craved them. Too much. Walls, people - things he had been raised to tell himself he didn't need. Shouldn't need. Was weak for needing.

But is it too much to ask to be safe for a while? Is it too much to ask for a rest now and then?

Apparently.

Daryl walks the wall.

He does this for lack of anything better to do, because it's a straight line to follow, because the road-that-was-a-river-that-was-a-road is no longer useful or trustworthy, and most of all because, though he shouldn't be able to, he feels her pulling at him. Like when he ran, when he told himself he wasn't that far behind her, that he would reach her soon. Like the car, like dragging himself and Carol through Atlanta, telling himself that he was close, that surely she would be around the next bend, that all he had to do was _have a little faith._

_Ain't done nothin' for us._

But he wants to have faith. He still wants that. To the extent that he can bring himself to mourn her - which he basically can't, _that's why he's out here now, like a stupid fucking idiot wandering around looking for the dead in a world of the dead and probably soon to be dead himself -_ he also mourns the death of that faith.

_Never know what you've got 'til it's gone._

That is not the voice of his brother.

He walks the wall, the concrete and barbed wire. It remains featureless as the sun rises in that flat ugly gray - barely worthy of being called a sun at all. But it's what he has to work with, so he uses it. He wishes he could see over that tangle of wire, though it's a very vague desire, and whatever curiosity he feels is a dull thing. Nothing is important except in as much as it gets him where he's going.

_Always good at putting things aside, huh, Daryl? Giving certain things up when other things seem more important?_

He stops dead, head cocked. The sun suddenly doesn't seem so bright, and as he looks around - the wall, the dirt track running along next to it, the trees and the grass off to his left and in front of him - it doesn't go _down_ so much as it appears to begin to go _out._ It stays where it is, but the light is going a deeper gray.

Going black.

He stands there for a moment, his hand still against the wall - the bleeding of his knuckles where he punched it has slowed to a sluggish ooze, and stopped hurting a while ago. But he wishes there was more pain, suddenly. Pain would be something to hold onto, as this darkness falls.

Once, when he was barely thirteen, he saw a solar eclipse. A total one. The whole area made a holiday of it, holding viewing parties - really excuses to drink tremendous amounts and shoot celebratory firearms at the sky - and even his father got into it. Daryl and Merle - home for a while - made crappy eclipse viewers out of boxes, and he was actually sort of excited.

Except not when it happened. The sun faded that day, got strange, got like something out of a nightmare, and then went out. Became a negative space, a hole in the sky. He thought of a black eye staring down at him, and he was too afraid to hide the fear and of course his father and Merle together tortured him for it, told him he was a little pansy-ass faggot, a fucking pussy, but that torture wasn't even close to equaling the fear.

He still sees it in nightmares. So of course it's happening now.

And whatever this wall was, it's not that anymore. It's changing, mutilating itself, rising and twisting open gaping wounds of windows, watchtowers like stacks of skulls. Chain-link fences in front of him and on either side of him that are thousands and thousands of interlinked fingers of the dead.

The dead pressing against them, moaning and growling. They want to get in, get him. Get his people. Rip them apart, spill blood and bowel everywhere, gnaw on bone.

Do that to her. Make him watch. They shouldn't have the intelligence for that, but he stares into their dead eyes from his place at the fences, the bow in his hand, and he knows that's what they mean to do when they get inside.

And they will. Because the man waiting beyond them will see to it that the gates and the fences come down. He'll see to it that they can.

The Governor smiles.

_Daryl. I have to say, this really is disappointing. Then again, that's pretty much what people have come to expect from you, isn't it?_

Daryl stands his ground. The dead sun is swelling like an infected eye, blackness eating up the sky. He's terrified. He won't let it show. If this is what he has to face down to get back to her, that's what he'll do.

 _Look at you._ Naturally the man has Michonne's sword, and he points with it like a teacher pointing at a blackboard. _You're running around like a crazy person. You shouldn't even be alive right now. You can't tell the difference between what's real and what's in your damn fool head, how are you going to tell the difference between a tree and a walker and Rick fucking Grimes?_

 _If it comes to that, how are you so sure you'll be able to tell the difference between a walker and_ her? The Governor laughs, cheerful. He's finding this genuinely amusing. _You'll open your arms for your one true love and she'll chew your fucking face off._

"Ain't talkin' to you," Daryl says, and he's rather pleased when he keeps his tone mostly even. Regardless of the fact that he's doing exactly what he said he wasn't going to do. "You're dead."

 _If you hadn't noticed, that doesn't count for a whole lot these days._ The Governor walks forward, moving smoothly through the staggering masses of walkers, swinging the sword in the same idle way a man might swing a cane that's for nothing more than show. _Isn't that the point? Isn't that what you're counting on?_

Daryl doesn't answer. He digs down and finds a reserve of self-control, and he manages to look away. Looking for a way out of this, even as the dead fences are beginning to bow inward, and he can't see any way past them that won't get him killed in a way he doesn't think will allow for wiggle room.

But he doesn't think the goal of this is to kill him. It doesn't seem that simple.

The Governor has reached the fence and is standing, the sword in both hands, the dead seething around him. _What exactly are you going to do when you get back to her? Dig her up? Give her mouth-to-mouth?_ He laughs again. It's an ugly sound, and now he's close enough that when Daryl looks at him - he doesn't want to but he doesn't seem able to help it - he sees white things squirming out from behind the man's eyepatch.

Maggots. Because of course the Governor _is_ dead. He never denied that.

 _She's not a fairy princess, Daryl. You're not going to wake her up with true love's kiss. But that would be something, wouldn't it? That would be sort of the biggest joke this world of the dead has ever seen._ He raises the sword, and Daryl takes a step backward, because he knows what comes next. It's what came next _before,_ and for all his bravado he thinks he might be sick.

What comes next is everyone dies.

Even her. It just took her a lot longer.

 _You could just crawl into that hole with her. That's what you want, isn't it? You'd like her back breathing, sure, but you're still sane enough to know that's not going to happen. So the other option is to get in the grave with her, curl up with her and stay. Like you would have loved it if she climbed into that coffin with you. Wasn't_ that _a missed chance and a half? Everything might have gone differently. If you'd just figured it out a little sooner, stopped being so bashful and such a hopeless romantic and just went for what you wanted._

He grins. Two of his teeth come loose at the friction of his lips and drop to the ground. _If you'd sacked up and fucked her, Daryl, she might still be alive right now._

Daryl screams, screams and the bow is in his hands and the bolt is flying at the same instant the Governor brings the sword down on the fence and the dead flood through the hole, tear it wider, and the flood becomes a wave.

He stumbles back, still screaming - fury and hate and pain and the horrible sickness that comes with suspecting that the awful thing someone has said _might be true._ He still has the bow lifted and aimed but he's out of ammunition, out of time, out of everything. This is not the part where he makes it out alive. This is not the part where he takes Beth's hand and they run and everything is bad for a while but then everything is _almost_ good again. This is the part past all of that, where everything is just complete and utter shit.

This is the part where everything is just complete and utter shit and everyone dies.

The Governor is laughing as Daryl turns and runs, runs for what he already knows will be there. The door set into the wall, metal and crumbling brick and mortar, and what lies beneath it. This isn't life, is the thing. Even if he makes it, it's not life. It never was. He knows this place well enough to know that, this place with its illusions of safety, where people bled and sickened and betrayed each other and died, over and over and over. He knows that he's heading into just another kind of death, and he knows that this was all arranged to get him here, and yes, he might be and probably is totally insane, but is there really all that much difference between being insane and what life was like anyway?

What was he expecting to do?

He doesn't know. He just doesn't know. The sky is being eaten by the black, dead sun and the Governor is laughing fit to _split_ , and Daryl has no idea.

Maybe if he just looked back, looked far enough...

_Maybe I coulda done somethin'._

_Sure. Sure, you could_ always _have done something. But you don't, do you? You never do. You're always at the right place at the right time, and you never, ever do anything._

_You stopped looking. You didn't take the shot that might have stopped all of this. You didn't go with what Rick wanted, you didn't pull her back, and you never told her the truth, and she died not knowing._

_She died not knowing that you love her, Daryl. Because you. Didn't. Do something._

He's still screaming when his hand finds the door and yanks it open, almost yanks his arm out of its socket with the effort. The dead are on his heels, practically groping at his back, moaning and snarling and carrying with them the stench that hardly anyone smells anymore. He's screaming words that aren't words, a glossolalia of rage and grief. Not that it matters. But he's been told over and over that he has to go down if he wants to find her, he has to go _down..._

So that's where he's going.

The door slams shut. Seconds later, as he's stumbling into the dimness and trying not to tumble down the stairs, as the dead pile themselves against the door behind him, he realizes that he dropped the bow.

And what he feels about that isn't fear, and it isn't panic, and it isn't even frustration.

He feels _lonely_.

He sinks down on the top step and buries his face in his hands and laughs until he can't tell the difference between that and crying. Until his face and neck and _body_ ache like they did when he cried himself out in that fucking hallway where the entire world burned to the ground.

Well.

So eventually he gets up, takes hold of the metal railing at his side, and starts to move downward.

Downward into the Tombs.


	13. interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _is it cold, or fear? just keep singing_

_the signs are all there_

No more looking back. She doesn't need to. That voice is gone and things are clearer. Not much, not so much clear as before, but she can see, see the signs, and she can follow. She holds the make-believe bow, girl pretending, only she's not a girl. She's a lioness hunting. She can be this because he taught her. Fighting yes but she already knew some of that. No, he taught her to _find._

Look and find. 

Songbird now a bird of prey. Sharp-eyed. Pinpoint vision. Songbird became a sniper.

Walking. Pushing aside leaves, shrubs, hands on trees to steady. Head still hurts, but less and less, or maybe it's just less important now. Light, some, still, and that's good even if sometimes it's hard on her eyes. Light so she can see, free up more mind for listening. Listen for the ones who got up but not like her. The ones who, dead, are all dead. 

Stop and bend down. One knee. Brushing leaves aside. 

Clear track. Not a drunk. She smiles. It's a painful smile but also feels good. There's something warm in her chest; she's wet and cold still but she remembers. In the trunk with him, close to her. Looking at her, his eyes in the dark. Lightning and thunder, and she found those eyes and held them like gems in her hands, felt the facets. Every crystalline fragment. Every perfect angle. 

Close to him and safe. 

Fingers in the leaves, tracing. _I'm gettin' good at this._

_Step by step, lion-heart._

_Almost done._

The world is round. It comes to her as she slips through the gray under the trees, silent, swift. Eyes on the ground but also everywhere. The world is round - one of those facts that you know but which is also so contrary to what you see that your mind never quite gets itself around it. The world is round so if you walk far enough and long enough you just end up right back where you started. 

Back where you started. Back where it started. Ended bad but maybe if he thinks he can just go back, do it all different. 

_Oh._

He looked back and returned to her with everything new in his hands, gave it to her like a gift because it was all he could do when the words failed him. 

Should want the others but for such a long time it was only him. Only him in the dark, carrying her, and she felt safe. 

Walk and walk. Ankle better. She sees a rusty gleam and looks down. Teeth, all metal. Snapped now, not dangerous. But it rose up and bit her like a snake. He was there, gentle hands. Helped her up. Took her onto his back. _Bore her up with wings like an eagle._

 _It's a serious piggyback._ Laughs. Fist in her chest. He was so sweet, always under everything. Sweet and let her touch him and touched her and that was so nice. Nice and she wanted more of it and couldn't say. Didn't think about it, didn't let herself, but now as she looks back she knows she wanted his hands on her and didn't know how to say. 

Touching her with every little excuse. Picked her up and carried her like two goddamn feet, didn't need to but she wrapped her arms around him and laughed. 

And this is what she comes back for. He's lost. She has to find him. 

His tracks. His trail. Round and round and back to the same place where he started from. Because there's the road and the gravel and she looks up and she sees the forest of gravestones all in neat rows, the shadows, kept like a garden, and there the only color, the flowers, the strands of gold in his hands which also could have been her hair. Him touching her hair. Wrapping it around his fingers. Against his mouth. 

She stops and looks down at it. Color bright and alive. Only color. So beautiful. She never had to ask him to do it. It was just how he was. 

Turns and sees that stone. Those flowers on it, dead now. But the others keep blooming.

She takes them in her hands, runs her fingers over them, petals and stems. They're soft from the rain. They were soft in his hands. His hands are rough but she thinks they can be so soft with her. 

Lifts those flowers to her lips and kisses them, slow. 

His track. Leading away. Tombstones like little walls. Openings like doors. Toward the house. He went, not weaving. Straight line. He meant to go. Looking.

Where it started. 

_Oh._

She lays the flowers down, careful as he was. He went and she'll go too. This is not going back. Can't go back. This is what's coming. Heart tight in her chest. She's not dead. Lie in the coffin with him, feel how alive. 

_Almost done._

Her mouth makes his name into a real thing and she carries it on her tongue. Carries it back to him. 

Give it back to him with his heart. Make him whole again.


	14. hold on tight, it won't be long

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Here I am_   
>  _leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome_   
>  _burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack,_   
>  _my silent night, just mash your lips against me._   
>  _We are all going forward. None of us are going back._
> 
> ― Richard Siken

He's been down here before. Been down here many times. Been down here to kill, to kill the dead, then to search for the people he was sure had joined them. To fail to find them, and then to sit in the darkness and the decay and try to find a way to mourn them. 

Sitting in the darkness among the corpses with the knife. Thinking about Carol. Thinking about how it had all been for nothing, was all for nothing, about how you do what you can to protect people and when the inevitable danger comes you do what you can to save them, but in the end it doesn't matter, and the result of all your efforts is completely arbitrary. You can't do anything in the end. You can only stand there and watch stupidly, _uselessly,_ as they're taken away from you.

You don't even get to say goodbye.

Carol was alive, yes. But Carol wasn't alive because of anything he did. Maybe he found her, but he didn't save her. Carol was alive because Carol didn't die.

_Maybe I coulda done somethin'._

It's followed him down here. He walks through the dark - so much darker than he remembers - one hand on the cold concrete, feeling his way. His footsteps echo and it's the only sound; there are no walkers down here now, though he strongly suspects there are plenty of the dead. There's the smell of cool, musty air, the faint smell of rotting meat, but there's also a weird chemical scent he doesn't recall - vaguely antiseptic. None of that matters, because all he's really aware of is what's rattling around in his head. Bouncing off those particular walls. Caught and sent flying again by the Governor's infernally cheerful laughter.

_Maybe I coulda done somethin'._

She never denied that, when he told her. That's what he can't get out of his head. He said it and it sent her to him, because somehow she sensed he was about to break, that the words were the first cracks in the dam. He said it and she held him, held him tight like she half expected him to try to fight her off, but instead he allowed himself to fall apart in her arms. Pressing her cheek against his scars. Even if she couldn't see them then. She didn't need to; didn't they both have their share?

If she had lived she would have had more. They would have healed, thin and pale. They might have been beautiful. He knows he would have thought they were. He would have loved them, not because she had been hurt but because she was _there._

His knuckles are already skinned, crusted with dried blood. He has to stop, tilt his head back, breathe until he no longer thinks he's going to slam his head against the wall. Slam it into the concrete over and over until blood is pouring into his eyes and all the voices are quiet. 

_Maybe I coulda done somethin'._

Always looking back. Always looking back because in the end, that's easier than facing what's coming. Looking back to that day with her, that horrible wonderful day, that's easier than facing what's really going on, which is that he's probably not even really here. He's probably wandering around in that fucking field outside the barn, or he's lost in the woods nearby, and it's just a matter of time before something that used to be someone comes along and tears his throat out. 

And how's _that_ for doing things.

He starts walking again. 

He used to know this place well, all its turns and twists, almost all its doorways; he might not have known it all well enough to find his way down here in the pitch dark, but he could do okay. Do well enough. But now he has no idea where he's even going, and all the twists and turns are strange. The doors aren't where they should be. None of this is right. Is she even down here? Why is he even _here?_ His steps start to stutter and he starts to weave and wobble like a drunk. Like a dead man. This is what the intrusion of rational thinking does to you. It drives you absolutely insane, because it ruins whatever shelter insanity was giving you. 

He came down here because there was nowhere else to go. And because _down_ seemed right; everyone and everything has been telling him he has to go _down_ if he wants to find her, because she's in the ground, because they put her there and then they _left her_ and all at once that strikes him fully and unbearably as an unforgivable sin. 

She should still be there. So he should be able to find her, if he just goes down far enough.

But every twist and turn he makes, every time he gets confused and has to backtrack, every time he thinks he knows where he is and turns out to be wrong... He's less certain. These halls are cold and empty. Not even the dead walk here. Only him. If this is some kind of underworld, there are no spirits, not even of the damned, and there is no devil or lord or god.

There's only him in the dark. 

At last he stops, stands, drops the bow. It falls with a clatter, and just for the span of a hard breath he's back at the crossroads - wonders if maybe he never left it at all - and he's weary beyond all reckoning and knows he can't follow her anymore. So he lets himself fall and sits there, gasping and wracked with pain, and he thinks if he had just run faster, just gotten to her sooner, maybe hadn't told her to go to the road, if he hadn't gone to the door, if he hadn't wanted to get the dog for her, if he hadn't wanted to see her smile so badly, if he hadn't set her on the track that led her straight into the trap, if he hadn't burned the shack, if he hadn't let her go looking for her drink, if he hadn't stopped looking, if he'd shot the fucker when he had the chance... And then if he hadn't let Noah stop him, if he had gone with Rick's plan, if he had just pulled her back, just _pulled her the fuck back,_ if he had done literally every single fucking thing differently going back all the way to the very first hour of the very first day...

It would have made no possible difference. 

_That's the thing._

He looks up. The hall is a blaze of light - in comparison. Somehow he remembers that day being much darker. But now he's sitting against the wall in a brightly lit hallway - That Hallway - and he's alone, but her blood is on his hands, his shirt, he can taste it on his mouth, and that even that much of her is back with him is almost enough to make him sob. 

He's alone, her blood spattered across the floor, and he lets his hands fall loose into his lap and leans his head back, thinks maybe he could just stay here. Maybe that would be fine. Maybe this is enough. This isn't Heaven, but maybe it's a species of Hell that's almost bearable. 

But _That's the thing._

His eyes snap open. He's not alone. He's not alone, and that's not just _her_ blood on the floor. It's not, because he made that happen. He did it. He looks down, and there's a gun in his blood-slick hand. 

And he looks up and _she's_ there, hands crossed over her chest, her uniform neat, everything in place except for the hole in her forehead and the drying red streaks on her face. 

_That's the thing, Daryl._

He just stares at her. Doesn't move. His hand is tight around the grip of the gun, and for a moment he thinks maybe he should just kill her again because why the fuck not, but she shakes her head and looks coolly amused.

_Sure, because that would accomplish a whole hell of a lot. You already did that, Daryl. You did it and it didn't make any difference. You remember? Did it bring her back? Did killing me open her eyes, shove breath back in her lungs? Jump-start her heart? Did it do any of that?_

"Fuck you," he breathes, but the words are bloodless. There's no force in them, no real sound. "Fuck you, you fuckin' bitch, you killed her. Death was too good for you. You're lucky I made it quick."

Dawn cocks her head. _Really? You sure about that? You sure I killed her? Maybe I did. Maybe something else happened. Maybe a whole lot of things happened. Anything is possible._ She drops into a crouch in front of him, her elbows resting on her knees. She might be a corpse, but her eyes are bright and sharp. _Think back to that moment. How much of it is clear? How much sense did _any_ of it make? Was there any _reason_ for any of it? Any logic according to which it was operating? Was there a story there? Or were things just..._ She spreads her hands. _Happening?_

He shakes his head. He has no idea what this is all about, doesn't really care... but the gun is in his hand. It's definitely there. He can feel the weight of it. He knows it's loaded, because he just used it to kill her. 

He looks down at it, turns it over slowly. Consideringly. 

He's supposed to go _down._

Dawn sighs. _So that's really how you're going to end this? Don't you think that's a little melodramatic?_

"She's gone," he murmurs. "Don't matter."

_No, it doesn't. It doesn't matter what you do. And it doesn't matter how it happened. You can't change it._

He realizes, as he lifts the gun that killed her, that she's speaking to him with astonishing gentleness. No animosity, no blame - not for this man who ended her life even as she seemed about to plead for it. She's not berating him, and she's certainly taking no pleasure in his pain. Neither does she seem to be forgiving him, but he didn't come here looking for forgiveness. 

He came here to look back. 

He's looking at her as he raises the gun and presses the muzzle to his temple. It's cool. There's something very comforting about how solid it is. Like he could lean against it and it would support him. 

_Don't do this,_ she says softly. 

"The fuck do you care?"

 _I don't. But you still shouldn't._ For a second he thinks she might reach for him, might try to pull his hand away, but she doesn't. She simply looks at him with those bright, dead eyes, and in them he sees a woman who was holding on by her fingernails, telling herself every necessary lie to make it through another day, making herself cold enough and hard enough and cruel enough to survive, and while he feels no pity for that woman...

He thinks he understands her.

And he's all out of hatred. 

_That day, Daryl... That day will never make any sense. Not to you. Not to anyone. There's no sense to be made of it. Or if there is, now isn't the time. You've been telling yourself you could have done something, you could have changed how things went. You've been telling yourself that your entire life. How true has it ever been? How much evidence have you ever seen to back it up?_

He closes his eyes. His finger is on the trigger, and it would be so easy to squeeze. Squeeze and finally _do_ something. A last thing. "Stop."

 _No. Do whatever you want with yourself, but first you need to hear this. Daryl, it doesn't matter whether or not you could have done something. It never has. You look back and you look back, and you go over it in your head a thousand times, and you come up with a thousand different alternate scenarios, but in the end it doesn't matter. The living are still living, and the dead are still dead. You're not God. You don't have a time machine. And if this is a story, you're not the one writing it. All you can do - all you could_ ever _do - is look forward, and decide what to do with the time you have left._

He does feel her hand then, on his - not trying to pull the gun away from his head but just resting there, her fingers cool on his bloody knuckles. 

_And you can cut that time short, sure. If you want to. It's entirely up to you. But killing me didn't save her, and killing yourself won't bring her back._

_If she comes back, she comes back. You have nothing to do with it._

_Whatever else you do now... You can't spend any more time looking back. That's what will take everything away from you._

Her fingers vanish, her hand - and then he realizes he can't _feel_ her there anymore. None of her. 

And then the gun is gone too. 

He opens his eyes into dimness. Not the hallway - and not the Tombs. This is a different place entirely. 

Cabinets. Stainless steel. A table shoved against one wall. A corpse crumpled against it, another one lying halfway up the stairs at the far end of the room. There's light coming down that stairwell, faint. Soft. He stares at it, his hands empty. He glances to his right and the bow is there - right where he dropped it. 

Antiseptic. Formaldehyde. Other chemicals he can't identify. 

It was here. It was right here. 

His head drops back against the wall, hard enough to send stars flashing through his vision, and he wishes he had the strength to scream, but all that comes out is a rough, exhausted whimper. Because of course it would end here, right where it began - but this isn't an ending. He doesn't get an ending. None of this makes that much sense, and he doesn't have that much control. Maybe he could have done something. Maybe he couldn't have. All those choices are gone, and there's only the Hell of Now. 

He doesn't get an ending. He just gets whatever comes next. 

At last - because he's all out of choices - he stumbles to his feet, picks up the bow, and heads for the stairs. Moves past the dead, past everything he ran from, everything he left behind. He looks up, blinking in the light, and starts to climb. 

Up. Out. No more looking back. 

There's nothing behind him anymore.


	15. the darkest hour of the darkest night comes right before the dawn

Sun came out.

Going down now.

Stand in the doorway. Busted open, hanging half off hinges. Crooked and wrong. Scratches on the frame, places where they clawed the wood apart like flesh; run soft fingers over it, gentle, like she doesn't want to hurt. She needs to be tender with this place. She feels it here in the late day bloody sunlight, red like an open wound.

Never healed. She wants to. She knows she can. Time is what she needs, but not all of it.

She knows him, knows he'd be hurt so bad. Worse than her. She got out of the ground, didn't she? Got out of the dark and the dead, bigger and stronger than a bullet, lion in her head. Eating all the pain. She's golden fire. She has claws for a trigger finger, and she'll crash forward like an eagle diving for prey.

But _I still sing._

Moving through the door. Hands still on it, stroking the wood. She loves this place; that's the truth. In the end wasn't safe, but for a while it was, and he wanted to stay here. With her. Wanted to stay with her for the rest of his life. Didn't say that, but she looked at him in the candlelight and she knew.

_Oh._

No candles now. Just sun, westering. Light splashed all over white wood. Lovely. Ache in her chest; she remembers this all so clearly now. One of the few things she still has. And maybe it'll all come back in time, in the time she needs, but right now...

Everything in her is quiet. Just her breathing and the falls of her feet. No more roaring in her head. Lion padding soft, moving into the night. No kill, not now. Home, warm den. All waiting.

Here the track is gone. All gone. None of him left.

_End of the road, songbird._

Tears and the last of the blood washing into her eyes. Like it did then. It did then, with him, with his, his and hers together, like it always should have been.

But his own tears blinded him. He didn't see.

 

~

This is not a maze. This is no labyrinth, and it's not dark. Everything is gentle evening light. No more rain, no more lightning. The storm is gone. The underworld is far below him. No more black water, no more dead faces. Merle in the boat, hand on the tiller, his other raised in a final sad farewell. The Governor, back turned, returning to the shadows in which he made his home. And Dawn, Dawn in the hallway, watching him go with her bright eyes. Not blaming him. Not hating him. Regarding him with all the indifference of the dead. He doesn't have to look back to know they're there, all the dead, his dead, faces among so many more. Leaving them behind. Moving up. Up and out and back into the light.

Daryl isn't dead.

So now he just has to figure out what _alive_ means.

He knows these halls, their brightness, how clean they are, how they seem like a different world. They were, once. In such a short time he came to love them - or to believe he could, if she would only live there with him. For the first time he looked at a place and thought _home._

Not even the prison was like that. He always believed that sooner or later they would lose it. That it couldn't last. But moving silently through room after room, he understands that he really did believe. Because with her, almost anything seemed possible. She turned the entire world upside down. Tiny, insignificant things took on worlds of importance. Simply surviving was no longer enough. Corpses became beautiful. Goodness was attainable. Fire itself was cleansing. Fear was a waste of life. Every moment, every second, every breath he drew, every time his heart had the sheer audacity to urge the blood through his veins.

With her, he believed he could live.

And he is alive. He is.

He touches the walls, runs his hands over the molding. Feels the cracks, the little roughness, the marks of age and wear, everything that tells him this - at last - is real. Closes his eyes and listens to the silence. The wind hissing softly through a broken window somewhere. His boards are all there, nailed up, but they don't keep back the light. They never could.

He just wanted to stay. It was all he ever wanted in the end. Just to stay and live.

_No one gets to live._

He bypasses the kitchen. Walks past without looking. He can't go in there. He can't even see it. He knows - without needing to spare it a glance - that it will all still be there: the jars, the bottles of soda, the spoons and the paper and the pen with which she was writing. It'll all still be there, just as they left it. Waiting for them to come back and finish that conversation.

_Oh._

He can't. It is at once too horrible and too kind. Where he's going is a different form of torture.

Is it torture to be born?

He doesn't remember. But he suspects it might be so.

As he moves down that last stretch of hall, those last few feet, he thinks he can already hear her. Distant. Faint. So close. The last of his madness leaving him.

Further away than he'll ever be able to reach.

 

~

Footsteps. Hallway. She must be dreaming. Half lost in dreams still, thinking about him with her here, how it might have been. Should have been. If they didn't have to run again. So close to telling her something, in the kitchen, where she is now. Standing and looking. Cupboards still open. Still food. No one came back. No one came back for it.

He's not here.

She reaches up and touches one of the jars. Runs her hands over them, smooth and cool. Solid. Real.

Peanut butter. Jelly. Pig's feet.

Almost feel him next to her, warm. Wants to. Fingers in the jelly to make her laugh. Knew it - all to make her laugh, like suddenly her smile was all he needed to stay alive.

Never saw him like that before. Everything changing. Everything moving forward.

God, her head hurts so bad, and she's so tired.

Turn back to the table, look. _Make yourself look, lion. Be brave._ Chairs still there, pushed back. She ran. Threw him the bow. He told her to go. Cried her name.

_I'm not gonna leave you._

Never believed he was dead. But so afraid he was.

Should have stayed, she thinks, staring at the table. Should have stayed, fought; this was ours, really ours, and we should have fought to protect it. No more running. Standing on both feet, and if she couldn't she could lean on him, and it would be enough. Shouldn't have run.

Might still be here.

Might have been able to tell him. Might have been able to hear him say.

She leans both hands on the table, lowers her head. Note still there. Half written. Pen. Remembers holding it. Hand moving. Stopping, his voice.

_Maybe you don't have to leave that. Maybe we stick around here for a while._

_We'll just... make it work._

She looks down at the paper. Never even got all that far. Wanted to say - felt grateful. So much good after so much bad and felt like a gift. Almost believed. Had faith. Wouldn't kill, to have that. A little. Even a little.

She's fire. She's all roaring, she's all rage. Fingers are claws and tear the paper off the table, crumple it, hurl it against the wall. Just paper, can't even throw all that far. She wants to scream. She wants to scream and roar and throw the jars against the wall, break them open, break the chairs, the piano. The coffin. Beat all to splinters, all torn cloth with her claws, her teeth, all ruins. Set it all on fire. Burn it all down, leave, don't look back.

He's not here. If he was here he would be _here._ He would be waiting for her, he would be ready to tell her. Ready to listen. Was a lie. Songbird doesn't sing anymore.

No one left to sing for.

Sun is turning everything to fire, turning everything to blood. She's not a lion. She's not a songbird. She shouldn't even be here. Should be in the ground, because she got shot in the fucking head, and that's a fairly unambiguous thing. There's really only one outcome there and it doesn't include walking around.

Herself coming back to herself. Just for a moment. Everything clear.

Then curtains over stage again, standing ovation, bows all around, show over, everyone off to bed. _Did good, little songbird. Little lion. Honey on your tongue, wings in your heart, made it this far but now it's over._

No breaking, no burning. No tracking. All gone, all gone and goodnight.

Turning to the door. No looking back. This was someone else's white trash brunch. That someone is gone. It's just her now.

Only one more place to go. Comfy bed. Sleep. Where she should be.

But he should be here to carry her.

 

~

How long did he stand in this fucking doorway?

He doesn't remember. He asked himself the question before and he didn't know then, and he doesn't know now. Standing here, in the same place, looking in and holding his body in just that way and not looking back anymore but just _feeling._ Haunted by the ghost of himself, this last thing he can't let go of.

How long did he stand here and watch her? How long did he listen? How long did it take him to forget himself entirely, not even a ghost anymore, nothing in the world but her? He had no idea, then, what he felt. Had no idea what it meant to lose himself that way. Had no idea what it meant that it was such a struggle to return.

He could have stayed there for hours and listened and watched the candlelight shine on her, glow in her hair. He could have stayed there forever and been happy.

If he had known.

Except no.

He breaks away from that moment, takes a step into the room and then another. He feels the bow heavy at his back and the carpet soft under his feet. The room is dark now, dark but for a single shaft of ruddy sunlight passing over the floor. Passing to the piano. Beaming toward the coffin. Soon it'll rest there, like a spotlight. Like God's finger pointing the way.

No, no more _if._ No more _maybe._ What he could have done, what he should have... none of it matters anymore. He's here now, and he's alive, and he's alone, and either he lies down and dies or he gets up and figures out how to go on. He gets up off that road and picks a direction, he makes his way back through that field to the barn and he...

_Just makes it work._

"How?" It's very loud in the stillness. _How? How do I make it work?_ He never knew. He was counting on her to show him, to _teach_ him. If it seemed possible it was because she was there, and now that she's gone...

_How?_

_Come back and show me._

"Please," he breathes, turning in place, face twisting and throat locking up, and it's a useless prayer. It's a stupid prayer. He doesn't even know who he's praying to. He doesn't have any idea what kind of deal he's trying to make. He's not looking back anymore, he's not thinking about everything he could have done, and he knows there's nothing he can do now. But he's alone and the piano is silent and the coffin is empty and the light is dying, and he's alive but he doesn't know how to be.

_He doesn't know how._

He's here and everything else is behind him. There's no water in which to drown. There are no dead by whom he can be devoured. There's no gun, no bullet. Nothing he can use to find her. It's just him, him alone, and that's hell. That's his Hell. At last and finally.

_You're gonna be the last man standing._

_You are._

"I don't want it." His voice breaks. "I don't want it, Beth." Praying to her, then. The only thing he ever really believed in. "Come back. I don't..." _I don't have anything. I don't have anything to trade. Just come back. Just please come back._

_Just be alive again._

 

~

How long did he stand there, listening to her? She never knew.

How long does she stand there, looking at him?

She'll never know.

_Sing, songbird. Little lion-heart, full of roaring. How far you've come._

_How strong you are._

 

~

She's coming for him the moment he turns and sees her.

There's an instant - a single nightmare instant - where he's sure it's another lie. It's another trick, another torture his mind has concocted, as if sufficient amounts of suffering will be the last thing she needs to come out of the ground.

But then he's falling and she's catching him, as wet and muddy and filthy as he is, and she's warm and solid and she's _alive,_ and her hands are combing through his hair and her lips are moving against his brow and all he can do is clutch her, hand against her back, one against her chest, feeling frantically for the beat of her heart and the expansion and contraction of her ribs. His mouth at her throat, her thrumming pulse. Her rhythm. Her song.

He might be saying something. He might be praying. He might just be coming apart against her, the way he did before - the prelude to this. Just a little shower, a spring rain.

This is the storm that follows, that brings with it a clear sky and a gentle sunset, the last of which is now leaving them and releasing them into the night.

He doesn't understand. He doesn't need to. Because the truth is that there was nothing he could have done, no deal he could have made, no trade sufficient. He was never clever enough or fast enough or strong enough to bring her back. Even if he loves her more than he can imagine ever loving anything or anyone, that would never have been enough.

If she's here, it's because she's strong.

 

~

No more pain, she thinks, kneeling on the floor with him in her arms. No more pain, not for now. Maybe later. Still a little confused, still glittering pieces, but enough of her is intact. What's broken, they'll put back together. For now this is the end of the track, the path that led them up and out and back into the light, and if he was lost she found him.

_I'm gettin' good at this._

_Pretty soon I won't need you at all._

She didn't. Not then. And now it isn't about need.

It's about something else.

 _Oh._ As she kisses his brow, the tracks of his tears. As she kisses his bloody hands, holds them in hers and intertwines their fingers. Kisses his mouth, and it means anything and everything.

_Oh._

Everything that comes after that. The night now and afterward the dawn. All of it, for them.

And never looking back again.

 

 

_the end_


	16. afterword (I raise my cup to him)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had some Thoughts on this story, which were too long for the end notes. I beg your indulgence - read or not, as you will.

When I began this a month ago, I said I knew where it was going. In a sense that was correct. In many other respects I ended up being completely wrong. 

Like many things in this corner of the fandom these days, this was a direct response to the nightmare of Coda and an attempt to work through the aftermath. Personally I'm not really much of one for fix-it fics, and I don't regard this as one of those. Rather, what I wanted to do was look back at everything that led to that awful moment, and also to look forward at what its effects might be. 

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seemed like a perfect fit: couple fabulously in love (bonus: one of them is a singer/poet), affair cut tragically short (on their wedding day, no less; a moment of profound union juxtaposed with Beth and Daryl's moment of reunion), the one left behind utterly unable to deal with the loss, a journey into the underworld to make a deal, a long climb back into the light. In the myth, of course, Orpheus promises he won't look back until he and Eurydice leave the underworld - which he does, and the whole thing ends horribly, with Eurydice lost forever and Orpheus left to wander the world alone until his death.

Obviously I didn't want that in my story because we've all suffered enough. But the idea of _looking back_ interested me. What does it mean to look back in the context of profound grief? How do we remember the dead when we can't make sense of the moment of their deaths? We want our lives to be a coherent story. We desperately need it to be. Clearly Coda _is_ a story and is therefore subject to entirely different standards, but the question in general stands: How do we incorporate senselessness into that? How do we find meaning in meaninglessness?

What would it mean for _Daryl_ to look back? What would he be looking at? What would he be seeing? _Maybe I coulda done somethin'_ seemed to me to indicate a lot. What would looking back cost him? What _has_ it cost him already?

I expected this to a fairly straightforward retelling of the myth: Daryl is clearly Orpheus, Beth is Eurydice, and accordingly Daryl will make a journey to the underworld, meet his version of Hades, make a deal, and return with Beth to the world of the living. I never intended any of this to be literal, though I also never intended to imply it was all a product of Daryl's temporary insanity. Some of it isn't real. Some of it might be. I was not and am not sure which is which, and I prefer to leave the details up to the reader to sort out as they wish. But I thought the story would be pretty linear beneath its essential weirdness. 

You might have noticed that I initially warned for major character death. You might have noticed that warning disappeared recently. 

Then came a variable I didn't expect: Beth. Beth showed up and demanded to be directly included. More, Beth demanded a different role. When I began writing I thought she would be there, and I thought we would see her crawling out of her grave when the storm washed it open. But I thought she might wander a bit and then wait to be found, in Daryl's own feverish underworld. 

Instead something else happened. 

I don't remember exactly when I realized, but I do know there was a single moment when it became clear: Beth is not Eurydice. 

_Beth is Orpheus._

Beth is not the lost one. Beth is not the one being pulled down into the underworld. Beth is, at this point, far more alive than Daryl. Daryl is the dead one, and Daryl is the one who needs saving. Daryl is wandering in circles through his own self-made Hell of blame and loathing and despair, constantly looking over his shoulder, obsessed with what he might have done to make everything turn out differently, and completely unable to consider the idea that maybe he couldn't have done anything, and that either way it no longer matters.

Beth needed to go into that Hell and bring him out. No one else could. 

Plus, hey: Beth is the singer. Not Daryl.

All right, so: that much made sense. The rest of the story unfolded itself - a tour through the horrors of Daryl's past, the moments where he feels like he failed, the ghosts that torment him, finally to the hallway where he lost Beth, and then emerging into the light and the hope of the funeral home from "Alone".

The final thing I didn't expect was Dawn. 

I was pretty sure she was going to show up. I wasn't sure what she was going to say. What she ended up saying took me completely by surprise as I was writing it, and since I wrote it - last night - I've done some thinking about what she said and why. 

Look, guys, I don't know what happened with Coda. It was a mess. It will always be a mess, regardless of whether or not Beth comes back. With all our excellent writing and all our amazing theories, we can't make it _not_ a mess. It just _is_ one. And since I'm not one of the people who does straightforward fix-it fics (I think they're great, they just aren't my thing) I've been struggling with incorporating the mess of Coda into my understanding of the show and every element of meaning the show contains, in terms of how I'll always write about it from this point going forward. Because even if it was a mess, it still _happened._

At least, right now that's all we know. 

So here comes Dawn - Dawn, of all people - to say _You're right, it was total bullshit. It made no sense. You could have done better, Daryl - and Sunny. Anyone could have done better. But it's not your story. Your story is what comes next._

_Make of it what you will._

So Orpheus has found Eurydice. They're reunited, and now they're only for the living and the light, as they always deserved. To paraphrase Stephen King: they may not live happily ever after, but there _will_ be happiness, and they _will_ live.

But me? I don't get that ending. I'm just a writer. I tell the story; I don't get to be in it. I'm still puzzled. I'm still with Dawn in that hallway. We're still trying to work it out between us. As it turns out, she's pretty good company.

We don't get endings. But here is the end of this. 

Thank you for coming with me. 

_To Orpheus - and all of us - goodnight, brothers, goodnight._


End file.
